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The Impact of Regional International Parliaments on Governments’ Policy Frameworks for Gender Equality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2020

Senem Ertan*
Affiliation:
Social Sciences University of Ankara

Abstract

Countries around the world adopt different types of gender equality principles in government action plans, and these principles play a critical role in determining public policies regarding gender issues. International actors may prod countries in this direction; these actors include regional international parliaments. However, the power of regional international parliaments varies, allowing us to investigate the extent to which they have an impact on national governments’ adoption of policy frameworks for gender equality. This study analyzes the impact of regional international parliaments on governments’ gender equality policy frameworks. A three-dimension scale was developed to measure the degree to which governments have developed policy frameworks for gender equality. In multivariate modeling using a broad range of control variables, the study finds that the strength of regional international parliaments has a robust impact on governments’ policy frameworks for gender equality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Jessica Schroeder for her contribution to previous versions of this article. In addition, I am grateful to the hardworking coders, Fatma Yol and H. Rojda Aykac, for their work in coding the dependent variable of this study. I also would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to Prof. Valerie Hudson for her encouragement and comments. Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the reviewers of this manuscript for their constructive comments and suggestions that encouraged me to improve this article.

References

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